nvALT

nvALT 2 is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and interface modifications, including MultiMarkdown functionality. It has been developed by Elastic Threads (David Halter) and Brett Terpstra, and made available for free (donations accepted).

Please report issues on GitHub, not on Twitter or via email. It helps keep everything manageable and avoids us having to answer the same questions in a hundred different tweets and messages. Along the same lines, please take a look at existing tickets before starting a new one.

What it is

Notational Velocity is a way to take notes quickly and effortlessly using just your keyboard. You press a shortcut to bring up the window and just start typing. It will begin searching existing notes, filtering them as you type. You can use ⌘-J and ⌘-K to move through the list. Enter selects and begins editing. If you’re creating a new note, you just type a unique title and press enter to move the cursor into a blank edit area. Check out the descriptions at notational.net for a more eloquent synopsis.

Want a great primer on using nvALT? See Michael Schechter’s nvALT 101.

Notational Velocity Features

Option for horizontal layout with multi-line previews in notes list

Words between [[double-brackets]] will become links to other notes

Tags are synced to Dropbox and searched by Spotlight, via OpenMeta

Tags are auto-completed while typing in the tag-entry field

TaskPaper-compatible strikethrough formatting using the “@done” tag

Fully plain-text-based automatic list-bullet formatting

Note-titles inside double-brackets are (optionally) auto-completed

“Show in Finder” command for revealing selected note-files on disk

Highlighting of search terms can be disabled

Dragging the divider to the top or left of the window will hide search field

Installation

Just download the file, double-click to unzip, then drag to your Applications folder.

If you’ve been using the original (or another fork of) Notational Velocity, you can install nvALT (which has the same application name) alongside the original application. nvALT uses its own preference file and database as of version 2.0. Previous users of Notational Velocity or nvALT will be greeted with the default settings when they first launch 2.0, and will need to set up preferences for color, sync, etc. again.

If you have a custom version of MultiMarkdown installed in ~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown, nvALT will use it. If you don’t, it will just use its bundled version. No problem!

Customization

After the first time you run the Preview window, look in ~/Library/Application Support/Notational Velocity and you’ll find two files: template.html and custom.css. If you’re handy with HTML and CSS, feel free to customize these in whatever way you like. You can add Javascript as well, but you’ll need to load external scripts from a url or using a full file:// path. If worse comes to worst, you can just delete or rename your customizations and the default files will be put back in place automatically.

PPC/Tiger support

Note: Apparently our build is not particularly PowerPC compatible. Since we don’t have PPC machines to test on, it’s difficult to provide compatibility for them. We’ll do our best. In the meantime, it’s probably best for PPC users to hold off or use this experimentally only.

Additional Credits

Darryl Thomas has done the development for the sync. It’s in preliminary stages, but is working. It does not handle incremental/progressive sync yet, so very large note collections with many tags can see unusually long sync times.↩